Cyprus – bike rides and other things

The main reason we ended up staying in Kalavasos is that there’s a bike shop there. We’d rented road bikes last year in Spain and had a breathtaking day-long ride. I say breathtaking not just in terms of the views but also terms of the mountain we had to ride over to get to the coast, and then over again to get back. This time were looking for something a little easier, and had more time to ride. We rented the bikes from a Swedish man named Borje who runs the shop in Kalavasos.

Our first bike ride, following Borje’s suggestion, was east along the coast toward Larnaca. To get to the coastal road, we had to go up and down some pretty huge hills. When you live in a place like Hannover, where it’s hard to find a slight incline, every hill seems huge.

The route took us past Agios Theodoros:

And through a valley of citrus trees  - oranges, lemons, even some grapefruit.

 Then along the water: 

We even saw olive trees and a few artichoke farms:

Artichokes are weird looking

At this point I was feeling happy and peppy and ready to ride all day. But after we turned to head back toward Kalavasos, it wasn’t so easy. Add being a little out of shape, hungry, thirsty, etc. - the ride got harder. Then Brian got a flat tire…. Suffice it to say that by the time we got back to town (93 km later) we were beat. We pulled into the King’s Bridge, a little bar on the edge of town. It’s run by a Cypriot-English family, a couple of dogs and a lot of cats (there are stray cats everywhere in Cyprus. I am pretty sure that one climbed in the window and hung out in our apartment all day while we were gone). We downed some cold Keo beer and burgers with fries. The bartender gave us some oranges from his garden to take home. Recovery had begun.

The second ride was us trying to find a hill route and never succeeding. We headed down a couple of dead ends and found our way to the dam:

At one time, there was a river running through Kalavasos. Today it’s all dried up, due to the dam that’s between the village and the coast. Thanks to scarce rainfalls lately, it’s low on water now, too. We never did find the road we were looking for, and decided to call it quits and try again the next day.

With some directions from Borje, we found the hill road this time. We were riding in the foothills of the Troodos mountains, where Cypriot wines come from and where resistance fighters plotted their attack against the British forces.  The first few hills were manageable, and the view continued to get better, until we got to the longest hill ever. It didn’t stop. I think the hill ended and somehow we were still inching upward. At one rest break, hearts pounding, sweat pouring down our faces, Brian and I looked at each other and he said, “why do we DO this to ourselves?”. This whole ride seemed like an awful plan. But then we started to go downhill and wind through little villages with stone houses and past orange groves and olive trees and smelled the freshly tilled earth in farms below. Then we got to an overlook like this and I said “Now I remember the reason we do this to ourselves”:

I’m not saying that Brian and I will seek out never-ending hills up which we can ride rental bikes during every vacation. But it’s a way to see the countryside, to smell it, to notice old ladies sitting in doorways and flowers growing out of rocks – things that you could never catch looking out of a car window. And there’s something strange and intriguing about wearing spandex shorts and reflective sunglasses, riding past an old man herding goats with a long stick. It's a clash of time and culture, I guess. This happened to us twice during the ride. They all looked at us, the goat herders and their goats. One of the goats was busy eating a plastic bag. I wonder what the herder thought of us...  maybe 'crazy foreigners, what are they doing going up that hill''? I am pretty sure the goat was only thinking about his plastic bag.  

Anyway, there were some more ups and downs, but we held our own for the rest of the ride. I think our next cycling vacation might be somewhere flatter like Holland, or Hannover, or North Dakota.